How do you build a star-studded ensemble with no true leads?

“Are you kidding?”

That was casting director Susanne Scheel’s immediate answer when she was first asked if she wanted to meet Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow about working on her then-upcoming film, A House of Dynamite.

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A series of Zooms led to an in-person meeting and eventually a job offer — and then the hard work began. The film calls for a wide-ranging ensemble with no leads asked to perform their roles over three intertwining acts. “It took me a minute to wrap my head around it,” Scheel admits.

But then she found what she calls a “beautiful” way in. “I started really thinking of it as five or six short films that each had to function on their own,” she says. “The biggest challenge for me was you couldn’t let the audience get confused about who was who for even a second given the pace of the film. So we started with the pillars.” Those “pillars” were the key roles that would eventually be played by Idris Elba (the unnamed POTUS), Rebecca Ferguson (Situation Room station chief Olivia Walker), Tracy Letts (STRATCOM’s General Brady), Jared Harris (Defense Secretary Reid Baker), and Anthony Ramos (Fort Greely’s Major Gonzalez).

From there, it was a matter of figuring out who sits next to them, and then who sits next to them and so on. “Because there were so many roles, I just had the absolute delight of bringing in actors I adored and loved, and felt like they sit beautifully into this world,” Scheel says. “And then we’d look at them in groups, and say, OK this person really would work well with this person, or who would be best to be that person who’s in the chopper sitting next to Idris. It was just beyond a dream.”

Bigelow always had Elba in mind for the role of POTUS, and reached out to him directly. But we don’t even see his face until the final of the three acts — in fact part of the tension is that we hear the President’s disembodied voice in an unrecognizable American accent throughout the first two acts, leaving us wondering. “That was my favorite idea of all!” exclaims Scheel. “That you just hear him for the first two parts in an American accent you’ve never heard him do before.”

But she’s also quick to call out some of the other roles as well, including the feature film debut of Malachi Beasley, who sits next to Rebecca Ferguson’s station chief in the situation room (and is about to propose to his girlfriend. “He had come out of Yale Drama School during the pandemic, so people just didn’t get to know him and see his beautiful work as quickly as they would have as he had graduated a different year,” recounts Scheel. “I was very proud to be able to give an actor who will be working for many, many years to come his first feature film.”

And then there’s Greta Lee, who Scheel had cast in Past Lives, and Kaitlyn Dever, who makes a brief but pivotal cameo as the daughter of Jared Harris’ defense secretary. “Given how little screen time each character has, we had to put heavy hitters in a lot of places, just so that the impact that we felt was necessary for the story was felt,” she explains. “A lot of people can play the secretary of defense. But who are you going to connect with quickly? And who in that short phone call to his daughter, who will have that impact and give us that connection?”

“The beauty of working with Kathryn Bigelow, most people say yes,” she says. “So you can call up incredible actors like Kaitlyn and say, it’s one scene the Kathryn feels is incredibly important to the story. Would you take a look? And she, of course, was happy to and signed on right away.”

In fact, she can think of only one actor — who she won’t name — who said no, but due to scheduling conflicts. “It was an incredible trust and leap of faith that I would call these actors and say, you know, there’s not the amount of dialogue you’re used to having, but it’s incredibly impactful,” she says. “They have to just really trust us, and that is what I’ve heard again and again from people. It’s such a large cast, but everyone really does have at least a moment or two where they’re so impactful, they’re so important, and it really elevates the actor and shows how incredible they are.”

What was also key to the casting process was authenticity. “[Screenwriter] Noah [Oppenheim] and Kathryn wanted to make this as authentic as possible,” says Scheel, which meant populating the House of Dynamite universe with actors with military experience. “[Military] people just have a stance to them. They have a way they talk to one another, a way they hold themselves physically. And she just can’t necessarily fully recreate that with just all actors. We need people who have done it.” So Scheel tapped into Veterans Affairs and reserves to cast veterans to build out the ensemble and other on-screen extras. Some of the principals, including Gabriel Basso and Malachi Beasley, also have military experience themselves.

Though she has credits on films like Past Lives and The Wife, A House of Dynamite represents her first studio film as a solo casting director — an achievement that isn’t lost on her. “It’s the biggest moment of my career.”

And it couldn’t come at a better time, with the Academy finally handing out the first Oscar for casting at the upcoming awards. “We have been holding our breaths for so long,” she says, of the branch’s long fight for recognition at the ceremony. “Casting is so much a part of it. If the right people aren’t on the set, reading the lines of the beautiful script being directed by the director, the whole thing falls apart. So it’s great to finally be recognized in this way.”

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